Please join us for this talk on Friday, September 19th, from 3-5pm in TB 130 (Anderson Hall) at Bogazici University. Matthew Fulkerson (UCSD) will be presenting. All are welcome.

The Presentational Character of Sensory Affect

Abstract: Nina comes home from vacation to find the milk left out, its rotten stench filling her small apartment. Before she realizes not to, she breathes in, and comes to have a deeply unpleasant olfactory experience. What an awful smell!, she thinks. There is a discriminatory dimension to her experience; she immediately recognizes the sour smell as that of rotten milk (and not that of sulfur or dirty diapers). It’s natural to attribute the sourness to the odor in this case: the fumes wafting off the milk bottle are chemically different from those found in sulfur and diapers, in a way that makes a difference to how she experiences them. What about the awfulness? Where is that? Is that also a sensible chemical property of the odor? If so, which one? Or is it instead something in Nina, a kind of subjective reaction to the odors in the room? In this talk I will defend a hybrid account of sensory affect, in which both answers turn out to be true.